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Report on AMSAT-UK Colloquium - 2002

 
Over 90 delegates attended from 16 countries and four continents; numbers have increased again. This may be because amateur radio, as a hobby, is attracting more people; there have been over 2000 new amateurs (plus 1000 upgrades) in the UK since January, and 500 of them were under 21. About 20 people said this was their first Colloquium (about the same as last year ... hmmmm).
Say cheese! The Group Photo

 
UO-14 communications Demonstration

 

Microwave equipment and antenna measurements were introduced last year; they turned out to be so popular that we repeated them again this year and they will probably feature in all future Colloquia. Thanks to Sam, G4DDK, and David, G0MRF, for their labours.

Antenna gain measurements were made with reference to a Polarad CA-L standard gain horn antenna, supplied courtesy of the Martlesham Radio Society (G4MRS). In all over 30 measurements were made on the University of Surrey sports field where the antenna test range was set up. The vast majority of measurements were made on 2.4GHz antennas including dishes with helix and patch feeds. The other common antenna type was the multiturn helix. On 1.2GHz just four antennas were measured. It is to be hoped that more antennas for this band will appear next year as the range appeared to work well in this frequency band and some interesting lessons were learnt.

Measurements were, this year, limited to antenna gain and matching on 1269MHz and 2400MHz. After providing noise figure measurements for the last 5 years it was decided that the noticeable drop in the number of converters and preamps being presented for measurement would warrant missing out one year.

 

 We have competitions at the Colloquium; this year we had the usual Quiz plus the "Smallest AO-40 Station" and "Best Speakers" awards. The quiz was won by Pieter PA3FWM with 29 correct answers out of a possible 40. Paul, VP9MU, will be putting this year's questions onto amsat-bb soon.

Our Beginners' sessions were well-attended too; it looked like we had a few more than last year - about 25 in each session; G7HIA, W2RS, and W3IWI all had audiences.

And the Beginners' live demonstrations on UO-14 proved to be popular again; thanks to W2RS and G7HIA for doing them - contacts across the Atlantic were made with the hand-held equipment. QSL via G7HIA. I thought this year's event was about as good as last year's but other people told me they thought it was better. Certainly it was up to the high standard we set here in Amsat-UK anyway.
University of Surrey Groundstation Tour
Photo - M0TAD

 

 The Gala Dinner on Saturday evening provides a change to do what radio amateurs like the most talk! This year we had an after dinner speech by our Chairman Martin Sweeting, G3YJO

 

 Another activity which is becoming a "regular" is live firing demonstrations of UoS propulsion systems. We weren't disappointed this year; very noisy.

 

News

In "The Old Days" we used to get lots of real news at the Colloquium but this has declined over the years.

Bdale, KB0G, made the following points in his talk about RUDAK on AO-40: There are no plans to use RUDAK as an fm repeater (as happened on AO-21). The 9k6 hardware system is about 10dB less sensitive than expected If the current DSP tests are successful, there could be a return of the 'ZRO tests (weak signal reception) on AO-40
AO40 goes far enough out in space to pass through the earth's magnetic bow-shock sometimes (CEDEX talk by G1WTW)


Work has resumed, with some success, on the Israeli GO-32 spacecraft with a view to putting it into amateur BBS service. The Technion Institute decided to hire a radio ham to help them promote the Techsat's BBS issue, and fulfill their promises to the Amateur Radio community ASAP.
Their first goal is to finish debugging the BBS code and load a stable BBS server to the spacecraft. At the moment they're experimenting with an alpha version in the labs and upload these versions to the spacecraft just to let the users "play" with GO-32 . It is not an official version and there is no "alpha group" of testers so they do not want bug reports.
Tidhar Teucher, 4Z5CA, is the man doing the work with assistance from Peleg 4X1GP,Ofer 4X6OJ, Shlomo 4X1AS, and Assi 4X1KX. He has updated the IARC's Techsat page, http://www.iarc.org/techsat, and will do his best to keep everyone informed about changes and progress in TechSat's status.


Has anyone heard about the Amsat-ZL project ? I hadn't until last week. Check out KiwiSat at http://www.amsat-zl.org.nz

Amsat-UK Annual meeting: new member Howard, G6LVB, joined the rest of the committee who were re-elected en-bloc. Full minutes will be published soon in Oscar News.